Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites — Further to our earlier story on visitors to Google Blogsearch being redirected to Baidu in China, new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu.

Microsoft Launches Drag-And-Drop App Builder Popfly — Microsoft just demoed on stage at the Web 2.0 conference a slick Silverlight application development service called Popfly, which just opened up in beta. Popfly lets anyone, even non-coders, create web mashups without writing a single line of code.

Firefox 3 to go native in appearance — What do you get when you cross a Firefox with a chameleon? — An open-source Web browser whose user interface is adapted to the look of the operating system it's running on. One change planned for the upcoming Firefox version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, is this more native appearance.

Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again? — Email providers are trying to steal some of social networking's thunder as fast-growing services like Facebook Inc. begin to encroach on their turf. — The biggest Web email services — including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit …

Viacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online — Switching gears, it will provide free views of the program in a bid to generate ad revenue. — NEW YORK — Media giant Viacom Inc. is suing YouTube Inc., but it's also taking lessons from the online video service.

Google Says Its Health Platform Is Due In Early 2008 — Google plans to bring its immense data storage and organization capacities to the field of medical care and patient records, Marissa Mayer, the company's head of search, said at the Web 2.0 Summit. — Telling her audience to …

Mobile phone use backed on planes — Passengers could soon be using their mobile phones on planes flying through European airspace. — Plans have been developed across EU countries to introduce technology which permits mobile calls without risk of interference with aircraft systems.

The Web is the Platform — The platform wars are over. Long live the Web. That was the basic message delivered by Jeff Huber, Google's vice president of engineering, in a ten-minute presentation at Web 2.0 a few minutes ago. His talk was nominally about widgets (which Google calls Gadgets).

MySpace Needs Internal Not External Developers — To read the coverage of MySpace's announcements on its new "platform" at the Web 2.0 conference, you would think that the site had been as closed to the outside world as North Korea, and is only opening up under pressure from Facebook.

Blu-ray vs. HD DVD: a Solution Abroad — Some Movies Are Available — In Opposing Format Overseas; — Turn Off the French Dubbing — Some savvy consumers are looking overseas for a way to take some of the risk out of buying a next-generation DVD player.

Adobe: 10 years, and all our apps will be online — Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen says within 10 years, the company will be offering all of its applications online. His remarks come at a time when we see more and more companies offering online applications as an alternative to desktop products.